Faculty Profiles
Design Projects Instructor: David Thomas
David Joel Thomas is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and designer working at the crossroads of visual art with special focus on digital media, critical and creative writing, and design at the object and architectural scales. His interests and training reflect his commitment to bridging the gap between critical research and creative synthesis. His current projects include “Paint and Print,” a word and watercolor meditation; “Threshold,” a collaborative poetic and philosophical dialogue exploring issues of photography, geography, architecture, and experience; “The Perfect Hours,” a collaborative series of short, free-spirited liturgical fictions; and “The Ur Project,” an improvisatory design exploration of Ancient Mesopotamian architectural typologies. He has exhibited at a range of venues including the Chicago Cultural Center, the New York Hall of Science through the SciArt Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, the Northern Illinois University Art Museum, and the Bridgeport Art Center. As an educator, David provides students with contexts and conditions in which they explore and express their own sensibilities and interpretations. He challenges them with open art and design propositions that they may approach, resolve, and communicate in a variety of ways. He provides them opportunities for problem solving and creative risk taking, and for integrating the material with the conceptual, the traditional with the contemporary, and current cultural production with their own interests and emerging skills. Learn more.
Drawing/Painting/Comics and Graphic Novels Instructor: Jason Dunda
Jason Dunda is a Chicago-based Canadian painter. He is currently working on a project entitled “Various Incidents” in which he translates imagery of authority and control into portraitive abstractions. Recent projects include “A Hall of Unflattering Portraits,” a solo exhibition at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Canada; “Highly Illogical,” a two-person collaborative installation at langeroverdickie in Chicago; “Everything Paper” at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; “Eating Cultures” at SOMArts in San Francisco. International exhibits include the Heine-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, and the Kuwait Art Foundation in Kuwait City. His work is represented in the collections of Todd Oldham, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto. Recent residencies include the Corporation of Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the SÍM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, and a four-month research and production residency in Paris sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts. He is currently completing a series of sequential drawings to be published by Phaidon Press. Jason Dunda’s cultural practice is led by a sense of dry wit and satire combined with an affinity to craft. He considers the undercurrent of polite dissent in his work to be indicative of the Canadian mindset. Learn more.
